the strength of the sunlight
by former-burning-example
Summary: Bella moves to Washington. Her new friends are weird. Rosalie/Bella. Complete.


A/N: I saw some Rose-bashing last night in some youtube comments, so I wrote this in retaliation. So anyway, here's a totally self-indulgent Rosella fic.

..

There's something about sunsets in Forks.

Spending all day surrounded by the greens and browns capped by somber grey skies does a number on Bella's mood. It pulls her down slowly, gradually. But the sunsets pluck her from the gloom. The pale blue light fuses into a muted golden glow as the sun sinks to the mountaintops, peeking just beneath the constant cloud cover, and for a few minutes, everything's a little better.

Today is exceptionally drearier than most days. The clouds are a particularly smothering shade. It's eight in the morning, but it feels like ten at night. It starts to pour the second she parks in the junior lot, and by the time her boots hit the asphalt, she's already standing in a puddle.

The nervous energy of being in a new school has faded somewhat. She thinks that it might have had a lot to do with the golden-eyed boy slinking over to her from across the parking lot.

Moving in the middle of the semester had tilted her social equilibrium to the point where she felt like she would never be able to catch up with all the apparent since-childhood friendships around her. So, naturally, she gravitated toward the outlier- her biology partner, a remarkably pale, perpetually messy-haired boy named Edward Cullen.

He seemed reluctant to even give her the time of day when they met, but now, four weeks later, he just greets her with a lopsided grin and jumps into the puddle at her feet, flinging little water droplets onto her jeans.

"Hey!" She shoves his shoulder, but he doesn't budge. She tries again, but it's like pushing a brick wall. "Damn, dude. What are you made out of?"

Edward shrugs. "C'mon. We'll be late."

..

Edward's kind of emo. Bella figured that out within about twenty minutes of knowing him. She's always considered herself a little gloomy around the edges at times, but Edward seems to have capitalized his teen angst.

They eat lunch in the music room- well, Bella eats. Edward mostly plays his guitar and scribbles down notes or lyrics every once in a while. He's big on the whole life and death thing.

Bella feels about as dense as a brick when he shows her his lyrics, so she just furrows her brow and nods soberly as if touched by the profound.

..

Bella has two classes with some of the other Cullens. She thinks that maybe Dr. and Mrs. Cullen have a beautiful people only clause in their adoption agreements.

At first glance, they're all varying types of conventionally attractive- Alice with her pixie-like features, Emmett and his curly dark hair and bright smile- but look a little closer, and you start to sense some kind of divinity. As in, they _look_ like teenagers, but they also look like old gods inconvenienced into taking human form.

Alice skips over to her, going right through the middle of the gym class badminton game despite the chorus of protests. She's definitely the friendliest of the Cullen/Hale bunch, even if she does come on a little strong. She's very confident in the idea that the two of them will be very good friends.

Alice links their arms, and Bella can't help but smile. She can practically feel Alice's mind working a million miles an hour coming up with new things Bella needs to try and places she needs to go with her in Port Angeles when they take their girls' trip one of these days.

..

Rosalie Hale is objectively the hottest girl Bella has ever seen in her damn life. Next to Bella's permanent windblown, just-out-of-bed look, she's perfect. She's also a touch icy which would normally be kind of a turn-off, but really, it only adds to her ever-stacking hotness.

Rose is a senior, and obviously uninterested in being surrounded by underclassmen all day. She's the only one of Edward's siblings that hasn't added her on every possible social media, made indefinite arm-wrestling plans, or offered to help her bring up her laughable history grade. Though one time she rolled her eyes and shook her head at one of Bella's bad jokes, and Bella still hasn't recovered from it yet.

They have homeroom together. Bella proofreads her college essays. She only has to look at the first line to know that Rose could probably get into Harvard or Oxford or some other uber ivy league if she wanted to, but when Bella looks at her portfolio, apart from the class-assigned essays, it's blank. No dream college list of prerequisites, no aspiring majors. Nothing.

When Bella asks her about it, Rose only gives a slight shrug. She takes her folder back and tucks it into her bag. "I'm not going to college," she says quietly but with a firmness behind it that tells Bella to let it go.

..

On the first sunny day since Bella has moved to Forks, she's stoked. Since it's not pissing rain non-stop, she thinks about talking Edward into ditching his last class period to show her some of the cool spots he's found in the tiny town that she _knows_ he has. He couldn't be a tortured artist without some cave in the forest to wail about existentialism in.

But when she arrives at school, he isn't there. He isn't in Biology a few hours later either. Their table is empty at lunch.

Her enthusiasm takes a pretty big hit when she checks her phone and comes up empty. It doesn't seem like Edward to miss a day of school without shooting her a text. She doesn't even need an explanation, maybe just a _hey losr, yr flyin solo 2day lol._

She ends up sitting with Jessica and Angela, relieved that they don't seem to mind that she kind of dropped them after the first half of her very first day when they were nice enough to show her around.

Jess catches her looking around the cafeteria and just shakes her head. She tells her that their parents like to yank them out of school whenever the weather gets remotely nice for camping and hiking and all that.

She tries to picture Edward roughing it out in nature, roasting marshmallows over a fire or Rosalie sleeping in a tent and waking up with pine needles in her perfect hair.

It doesn't check out.

..

When the Cullens return, the weather sucks too horribly to go exploring like she'd wanted to before. She asks Edward about his camping trip and for a fraction of a second, he looks like he doesn't know what the hell she's talking about.

"It was great," he says finally.

Bella raises an eyebrow but lets it slide.

..

In homeroom, Rose is listening to music, ignoring the room. Bella takes her usual seat beside her. She taps on her shoulder and waits as Rose gives her a sideways glance before pulling one of her earbuds out.

"So, I've been thinking about the whole college thing," Bella says. "I'm kinda overwhelmed by it too. Like… the rest of your life is just coming for you, and all these big schools are kinda intimidating. But I was thinking- there's a cool junior college in Port Angeles. Maybe you could do a couple years there and then transfer-"

"Stop," Rose says.

Bella shakes her head. "Listen, I hate talking about the future too, believe me. It's like the most depressing thing ever when people ask what your plans are, but I think you could-"

" _Bella_. Stop. I don't _have_ a fut-" Rose starts before clenching her jaw. "You wouldn't understand."

Bella wants to ask her to explain it then, but she doesn't. She just pulls out her working portfolio and strikes a line through the JC she'd been looking at.

..

In P.E., they're forced to play baseball inside the gym with a tennis ball and racket. Bella has always been hopelessly unathletic, so she just stands there and lets Alice strike her out, not that she'd stand a chance anyway. Somehow, tiny Alice manages to fling the neon green tennis ball so fast, Bella can barely see it at all. Even the more coordinated, sporty kids have trouble keeping up with Alice's pitching.

Bella's waiting in the batting line when she catches a little of some sophomore boys' conversation. They're talking about Alice. Bella bristles at the mention of her friend's name followed by _freak_

She looks across the gym, and even with the distance between them, Bella swears she sees Alice's eyes darken.

Her next pitch burns the ball straight through the netting of the racket. The sophomore boy gulps.

"Oops," Alice says, totally and completely unapologetic.

Later on their way to lunch, Bella asks her what the hell happened back there. Alice just sort of twirls around in the middle of the hallway.

"I'm a little stronger than I look, Bella," she breezes before skipping into the cafeteria to meet up with Jasper.

..

Rose catches Bella in the hall after lunch. She tugs at the sleeve of her flannel to get her attention.

"Hey," Bella says, smiling at her like she always does. She likes the way it always makes Rose look away for a second.

"I didn't mean to be so… harsh with you earlier."

"No, I shouldn't have kept pushing it on you. It's none of my business. Really."

Rose reaches up and fixes the collar of her shirt. She smoothes some of her messy hair behind her ear. Bella freezes, startled by her closeness, her freezing cold fingers light against the shell of her ear.

Rosalie sighs. "You're a mess, Bella… But it's sweet of you to think of me like that."

..

The day Edward saves her from being crushed to death by Tyler's van is the day Bella decides to start putting two and two together. After she gets home from the hospital, she opens her laptop. She feels kind of like an FBI agent investigating a drug ring, pinning things up on a corkboard, and connecting bits of information with red yarn. She also feels a little bit deranged as she types _cold skin + super speed + strength + hearing_ into Google.

As expected, she gets a lot of superheroes, movie trailers, and some Yahoo! Answers posts from 2007 asking about flu symptoms. The only remotely helpful information she finds is on a website on page 3 of the search results. It's for a bookstore in Port Angeles.

Unwilling to drive an hour for something that might not even help her, she just types Quileute legends into the search bar. Thirty seconds later, she's four paragraphs deep into a Wikipedia article about some things called the Cold Ones.

This is the part in the FBI crime procedural that she would rush out of the office without explaining her findings to her partner, putting herself and everyone else involved in danger.

Instead, Bella just closes her laptop and goes the hell to bed.

..

The next day at school, Bella watches them all day, looking for any reason to believe that they aren't just an absurdly beautiful and weird family.

But Edward seems totally normal in Biology. Just an emo boy with big hair and a really firm grasp on the phases of mitosis.

..

"Why are you staring at me?" Rose says, not even looking up from Bella's sad, sad essay about what odds she has overcome in her life. When she doesn't say anything, Rose tucks her golden hair behind her ear and looks up. "Bella?"

Bella shoves down the floaty feeling that always comes when Rose says her name or really anything at all. She has a really pretty voice. _She's_ really pretty.

Bella internally scolds herself for being so ridiculous last night with her feverish Googling. She smiles and shakes her head. "I'm trying to figure out if you guys are human or not."

She says it lightly like a joke, but Rose stiffens. Almost a minute passes before she moves at all, and when she does, it's to quickly pack up her things.

"Rose? Where are you going?"

"I've… I forgot I have a doctor's appointment." Rose passes her back her peer-edited essay and slips out the door before Bella can think of anything to say.

 _Okay_ , she thinks, _if I actually believed any of the stuff I read about last night, that would've been totally suspicious._

She looks down at her essay, marked to hell with Rose's pink glitter pen. At the bottom in curly script, it says _Good job, Bella!_

..

"I think you should come over today," Edward says as they're walking together to his Volvo after school.

"Why?"

"Carlisle and Esme have been wanting to meet you for a while. Plus, you… probably have a lot of questions."

Bella looks at him funny, but he's a little too busy brooding and staring at the ground to notice.

..

The Cullens live a few miles outside of Forks in a glass mansion in the middle of a sea of trees. Bella climbs out the passenger side and looks up in awe of the house. It's like something out of a magazine in the waiting room at the dentist's office.

"Woah, dude. You _live_ here?"

"Yeah. My mother, she actually designed it."

"Wow… her mind." Bella says, straightening her shirt. She doesn't feel like her questionably clean flannel and ripped jeans are a very good outfit for meeting Edward's parents, but she's kind of stuck with it.

She feels a slight twinge of nerves on the short walk to the front door. Before they even get there, the door flies open and Alice surges out and into a hug Bella really wasn't prepared for. For being so small, Alice sure has a certain… density.

"I'm so glad you're here! And that you know now!"

Bella smiles and nods, searching internally for what she's supposed to know. "Uh, yeah."

"Come on," Alice says, grabbing her hand and towing her inside. They go up a set of stairs that opens up into a huge living room with a kitchen up against the west wall.

Right away, she recognizes Dr. Cullen from the hospital. He's in the kitchen with Rose, Emmett, and a small, caramel-haired woman that must be Edward's mother. They all seem to look up at the same time as Alice pulls her into the kitchen.

"Bella!" Emmett says, going in for a fist bump. "Haven't seen you in like… an hour."

Edward waves him away. "Anyway… Bella, this is my mother, Esme, and you've met my father Carlisle."

Esme smiles brightly, and Bella feels herself mirroring the gesture. "It's wonderful to meet you, Bella. We've heard a lot about you around here lately."

Bella laughs nervously. "You have?"

"Of course. From Rose especially. She thinks you're quite…" Esme looks over her shoulder, "What did you say, darling? Dreamy, was it?"

Rose looks horrified. " _Mom_."

Bella flushes, obviously ecstatic Rose even thinks about her at all but also still buzzing with nerves at the strange situation in front of her. Emmett snickers and even Edward cracks a little smile. Alice looks proud for some reason.

Carlisle puts a hand on Esme's shoulder. "I guess we should get right down to it." He looks over at Alice and nods. The pixie-like girl disappears upstairs and returns seconds later with Jasper in tow.

Carlisle smiles at her. "I feel like I should congratulate you, but then I'd feel inclined to ask you what gave us away."

"I-"

"You must be truly observant."

"Um…? I guess." Bella looks around the room for some kind of clue as to what's going on, but everyone- save for Rose who can't manage to look up from the ground- is just looking at her expectantly.

Esme picks up on her uncertainty and quickly adds: "Bella, you should know that you don't have anything to worry about. You'll always be safe here."

"Safe from _what_?" Bella says finally, the confusion having burned a hole in her skull. "What are you guys even _talking_ about?"

Carlisle pauses, his brows knit. He looks back and forth between Edward and Rose, pointing at each of them, then crossing his arms.

"Rosalie told us that you found out," Edward explains.

"Found out _what_?"

"For Christ's sake, Bella!" Rose says, exasperated. "That we aren't human!"

Bella recoils. "I- I was _joking_!"

An incredibly lengthy and weighted silence falls over the room. Everyone just looks at each other and then away at someone else, before Emmett laughs, a sonic boom in the silent room.

"Nice, Rose," he says, clapping her on the back.

"Our apologies, Bella," Carlisle says, looking a little too concerned for Bella's liking. "We've put you in an awkward situation."

Bella's mind flashes back to her research from last night. The old Quileute legends. The Cold Ones. Strong and fast and eternal… She was _right_. She was right, and it's ridiculous.

"You're… vampires? All of you?"

Carlisle nods soberly.

"Huh," Bella says. "Cool."

..

Bella goes home that night with an overload of new information. The Cullens are all undead and immortal and survive on the blood of animals- elk, mostly. Edward can read minds, Alice can see the future, and Jasper is a walking, talking mood ring.

And Rosalie Hale thinks she's dreamy.

..

Things start to calm down a bit after she starts to spend more time in the Cullen house. Everyone seems to get over the initial shock of a houseful of vampires mistakenly outing themselves to a human pretty quickly, and Bella is glad for that.

She and Edward have been studying for a bio exam upstairs in his room. Edward clearly doesn't need it, having taken Bio II probably a couple dozen times in the past, but he helps her anyway.

"No offense, but that really sucks. I'm barely surviving high school the first time."

"None taken. You get used to it after the first fifty years or so."

"Sounds… not great."

Edward laughs.

Bella shoves her textbook off her lap, brain too full of things it'll inevitably dump out in like an hour anyway. "Okay, for real though. How come you didn't tell me Rose floats around here telling everyone that she's super into me? I thought we were friends."

"Are you kidding? She'd bite my head off."

"I'd risk it for you."

"I'm touched," he says dryly before rolling his eyes. "Just go talk to her. She's in the garage."

"The garage?"

..

When Bella finds her, she's leaning over the engine of a '66 GTO, grease streaked across her cheek and a few strands hanging loosely from her bun. She glances up as Bella walks in.

"You're kidding right?" Bella says, amazed she can formulate words with all the short-circuiting inside her brain.

"What?"

"You were already at, like, _peak_ hotness and now you're a mechanic? Jeez."

Rose rolls her eyes. "I can have interests, can't I?" She wipes her hands on a shop rag. "C'mon."

"Where are we going?" Bella asks, following her back up the stairs.

"The sun is setting," Rose says like it's an answer.

..

They sit side by side out on the balcony just outside the kitchen, legs dangling underneath the railing. Bella can see the mountains in the distance. Forks really is beautiful when she lets it be. It's so different from Phoenix in every way. Even the sunset looks alien. The clouds dull the light, but the golden glow makes her feel warm.

"So the other day," Bella says. "That thing you said about not having a future?"

Rose sighs. "We're all stuck like this, Bella. I've been eighteen years old for almost a century. I can't have a future. I can't move forward."

Bella nods like she understands, but she couldn't possibly.

A strong burst of sunlight breaks through the clouds, and suddenly, Rosalie lights up. Her skin glitters like thousands of tiny diamonds across the surface. Bella swallows. It seems like every time she looks at Rose, the girl finds a way to get even more unreal. She has to blink several times just to make sure this isn't some kind of vivid hallucination.

Rose smiles almost playfully. "The skin of a killer, as Edward says. He's quite dramatic."

Bella laughs. "An understatement… I knew you guys weren't camping."

Rosalie exhales like a laugh and turns to look at Bella. The strength of the sunlight dies and with it fades the otherworldly shimmering of Rose's skin.

Bella reaches out and swipes her thumb across the car grease on Rose's cheek. Her eyelids flutter with the contact.

"I don't have a future, Bella. I just have right now. My whole life is right now."

Bella can't help but think _god, me too_ , but she can't even find the words because Rosalie is leaning in and threading her fingers through Bella's hair. She doesn't go any further. The air hums between them, charged enough for lightning to strike, she's sure.

Her brain finally quits fritzing long enough for her to close the gap. She kisses Rosalie Hale, beauty incarnate, softly in the last dying rays of the sunset before the darkness settles in once again.


End file.
